Attention, Friction and Boring Ourselves To Death

Double screening has become so normal it barely warrants commentary. The television hums in the background while the phone glows in the foreground. Plotlines are half-heard. Dialogue competes with TikTok audio. A pivotal scene unfolds while thumbs refresh a feed. Entertainment executives now openly admit they are instructed to simplify story arcs, repeat exposition, and foreground spectacle over subtlety because viewers are assumed to be glancing down. Scripts are written for divided minds.It is both shocking and faintly depressing when stated plainly. And yet, guilty as charged. I, who once ridiculed the idea of the anti-screentime lock box, can concede its iota of merit. Not because the container itself is magic, but because the act of removing the device from the hand carries weight. The effort is the point. The friction is the point. Why one would not simply put the phone in a drawer for an hour remains unclear, but perhaps that small ritual of containment makes abstinence feel intentional rather than accidental.Boredom makes us scroll. Yet scrolling is boring. We are being bored to death.We have all heard the tired trope: human attention spans have withered to a duration shorter than that of a goldfish. But this narrative is fundamentally flawed. What we are experiencing across the cultural landscape is not a biological collapse of cognitive focus, but a measurement crisis. Industry metrics like impressions, time-on-site, and eye-tracking operate on the assumption that humans are simple attention-paying machines. They measure the direction of a passive gaze rather than the engagement of an active mind, failing to recognise that consumption does not equate to attention.What looks like dwindling focus may in fact be polarisation. We have “information snacking” on Shorts and TikTok, alongside extraordinary, sustained immersion when something genuinely resonates. The issue is not incapacity. It is intolerance for the generic, the low-trust, the low-payoff.The reality is more nuanced. Consumers have not lost their mental stamina; they have become selectively obsessive. The same individual accused of possessing an eight-second attention span will plunge into a 100-hour video game campaign, devour a three-and-a-half-hour cinematic epic, or commit to a four-hour podcast. The crisis is one of worthiness. The barrier to entry for deep, undivided focus has risen because the daily supply of low-effort, algorithmic content is infinite.We have hit terminal media velocity. Pace now exceeds our ability to process. An attention death match.Consequently, the modern consumer has evolved into a ruthless editor. Instead of acting like a spotlight that illuminates whatever marketers place in its path, attention now functions as a protective filter. When consumers engage in second screening or slip into the detached “machine zone”, it is not pure distraction. It is a survival tactic engineered to manage the digital firehose. By delegating ambient content to secondary awareness, cognitive bandwidth is preserved for what feels meaningful. Brands are no longer fighting for raw attention; they are fighting to pass through this filter. The Friction PremiumFor the better part of two decades, the tech and design industries have relentlessly worshipped at the altar of efficiency. The ultimate objective was the entirely frictionless experience. Yet, this aggressive pursuit of optimisation has birthed a chaotic, over-stimulated purgatory where consumers mindlessly authenticate log-ins, verify micro-deposits, and scroll late into the night in a blur of detached numbness. In a digital landscape where everything effortlessly slides, collides, and disperses into instability, friction is undergoing a profound and necessary rebranding. Once vilified as a primary user-experience failure, it is now being weaponised as the ultimate emblem of luxury.Enter the concept of “Healthy Friction”: something we have spoken about for years before industry discourse caught up. Also described as “intentional” or “productive”, healthy friction is the deliberate injection of strategic resistance designed to generate meaning, tension, and value. Consider the act of breaking in a pair of Dr Martens. The initial discomfort is undeniable, yet consumers willingly endure it in the pursuit of genuine comfort and cultural signalling. The effort invested transforms the footwear into something perfectly moulded to the individual, making the struggle inherently worthwhile. Friction acts as a vital tether to patience, forcing the consumer to stop, notice, and interact with an experience that resists cheap, instant legibility.We are currently witnessing a fierce cultural rebellion against this techno-feudalist obsession with hyper-efficiency. Consumers are actively seeking out “escape hatches” and migrating towards the analogue. Articles recount living without a smartphone for 72 uncomfortable hours, 100 days, even a year. The performance of disconnection is seductive. The resurgence of slow tech—from retro cameras to wired headphones—points to a deep craving for unedited, tactile reality over AI-smoothed perfection. Physical devices like Brick, which purposefully block distracting applications, or even the rise of the “dumbphone”, illustrate that imposing boundaries and demanding effort is now a highly sought-after consumer good. In the upper echelons of luxury, immediate availability is synonymous with commoditisation while requiring effort equates to true, commanding value. Fashion house The Row executes this masterfully by aggressively banning phones at runway shows and withholding product imagery from social media. In an industry built on shouting for relevance, their deliberate restraint and silence project immense worth. Similarly, high-status cultural discourse is retreating into “Dark Forests”—invite-only WhatsApp group chats and paywalled platforms where obscurity equals security, and taste is proven simply by knowing how to find the group.Concurrently, brands are shedding their eager-to-please facades in favour of playful antagonism and brutalism. By intentionally polarising audiences, brands forge unbreakable, cult-like bonds with their core devotees. Kanye West’s shockingly raw, lo-fi 2025 Super Bowl commercial cut through the highly produced noise of the event by being aggressively, unapologetically unpolished. Brands like Burberry are testing consumer stamina with sprawling, unoptimised nine-minute videos. The underlying strategic lesson is vital: in an era where AI can generate infinite, seamless content, cultural currency isn’t built by making the path to purchase easy. It is built by demanding deliberate effort and making the experience undeniably worth the work.The traditional blueprint for capturing public consciousness relied on a top-down, broadcast monoculture. We all existed in a shared reality, gathering around the same cultural touchstones and consuming media en masse. Today, that unified mainstream has evaporated. Influence no longer trickles down from a centralised authority; it bubbles up from hyper-specific, fragmented micro-communities, spanning from underground streetwear devotees to passionate romantasy readers on #BookTok. In this shattered landscape, brands are facing a “silent growth crisis”—the stark realisation that mass advertising budgets can no longer buy permanent real estate in the consumer’s mind. Aiming for broad, inoffensive reach only guarantees brand dilution; true modern influence requires being powerfully, intimately relevant in highly specific circles.For years, brands adapted to the algorithm by cultivating “vibes”—curating amorphous aesthetic moods to match digital currents. But the vibe economy has reached its breaking point; we are drowning in endless inspiration while starving for actual substance. The new architectural imperative for luxury brands is to transcend passive vibes and construct active story, myth or lore. Modern fandoms refuse to be spoon-fed; they demand the agency to build canon, induct new members, and decode complex narratives. Supreme exemplifies this beautifully through “knowledge friction”. By refusing to publish comprehensive catalogues, the brand forces its disciples to hunt for drop details, transforming raw information into a coveted currency and rewarding the dedicated detective over the passive consumer.If this is the new cultural currency, the comment section is the thriving digital marketplace where it is traded. As primary social feeds choke on algorithmic “slop”, authentic human connection has relocated to the internet’s equivalent of a medieval town square: the comments. Here, the “hot take” reigns supreme as the primary vehicle of cultural exchange. The audience, exhausted by being underestimated by sanitised corporate messaging, uses this space to assert their wit, expertise, and desire for nuance. For conversations deemed too precious or raw for public algorithmic scraping, communities retreat further into dark social platforms like Discord to build their worlds in private, away from the prying eyes of brand trackers.Navigating this reality requires brands to fundamentally alter their approach to community engagement. You cannot simply launch a campaign and declare a community built; you must earn the ongoing permission to exist within one. Rewiring the Psychology of Audience Capture: The Seven Triggers InvertedThe classical playbook of the Attention Economy relied heavily on psychological exploitation—utilising frameworks like Ben Parr’s Seven Triggers of Captivation to extract maximum engagement with the absolute minimum amount of friction. But as relentless algorithmic optimisation pushes modern consumers to the brink of exhaustion, luxury brands must perform a radical inversion of these very principles. Rather than using psychological levers to speed up consumption, modern luxury strategy demands we use these triggers to intentionally slow the consumer down, foster intimacy, and build brand “soul”.Consider the trigger of Automaticity, traditionally used to unconsciously grab attention via bright colours or loud digital alerts. In our current sensory void, algorithmic loudness is effectively rendered as white noise. The luxury pivot is towards “Sensorial Potency”—relying on the unedited, physical weight of the analogue soul. We are moved by the heavy, satisfying vibration of deliberate digital design or the enduring permanence of a printed publication, things that inherently affirm our human “aliveness”.Similarly, the concept of Framing must evolve. With the collapse of the monoculture, there is no shared mainstream context left to leverage. Instead, brands must engage in deep “Worldbuilding”, constructing proprietary multiverses at the cultural extremes where only their specific rules and fantasies apply. Disruption, once defined as briefly shocking the viewer, has matured into “Strategic Resistance”. To disrupt today means to refuse ease—implementing access hurdles, scheduled drops, and ritualistic queuing to literally halt the consumer in their tracks.The Reward trigger has also undergone a profound shift. The cheap, toxic dopamine loops of the past decade are being replaced by the psychological phenomenon of the “IKEA Effect”. We now understand that psychological labour directly correlates with love and increased valuation. When a consumer has to work to decipher a brand’s lore or endure a strict waitlist, the friction is viewed as a rite of passage that grants coveted, hard-earned insider status.Furthermore, Reputation can no longer be effortlessly rented through traditional celebrity influencers; it demands radical transparency and “Proof of Work”. Authority must be earned from the bottom up in niche subcultures, rather than bought at the mainstream level. Mystery is no longer about leaving a narrative cliffhanger, but rather “Algorithmic Evasion”—leveraging the “Dark Forest” theory where actively hiding information in whisper networks makes it exponentially more valuable. Finally, Acknowledgement has moved far past empty broadcast validation towards “Radical Belonging”. True brand loyalty is now forged peer-to-peer in the comment sections, where brands invite fans to collaboratively co-create the legacy. In this post-attention paradigm, transforming a passive scroller into a devoted participant requires utilising the mechanics of psychology to champion difficulty, weight, and deliberate restraint.To reiterate, attention has not disappeared. It has become discerning. In a world engineered for frictionless consumption, the brands that endure will be those willing to slow the pace, introduce resistance, and offer something worth leaning into. The task is not to interrupt the scroll. It is to justify the stop.Matter Of Form is a consultancy specialising in brand, CX and digital innovation for timeless brands. For brand world and interaction work, contact us at hello@matterofform.com. We are not losing our attention. We're weaponising it. As double screening becomes default and scripts are written for divided minds, brands face a harder truth: in an age of seamless content, only friction, depth and cultural weight earn the stop.

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Attention, Friction and Boring Ourselves To Death